Did Warren Beatty Really Have Sex with 12,774 Women Who Weren’t Julie Christie?

Peter Biskind’s new Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America is, apparently, a compelling study of a savvy, serious (and self-serious) man’s struggles to do the work he wanted to do in Hollywood—Michael Chaiken’s Film Comment review is the best I’ve read, if you’re browsing in your local independent bookstore at some point—but all that’s been overshadowed, of course, by the fact that Warren Beatty fucked everyone, all the time, vigorously.

This has long been widely known, of course, but not really systematically documented before now. Delving into the murky past of sexual encounters transacted decades before Facebook, Biskind guesstimates 12,775 notches in Beatty’s bedpost, “give or take, a figure that does not include daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings, stolen kisses, and so on,” assuming the equivalent of a sexual encounter with a new, different woman every single day between the day Warren Beatty lost his virginity (a national holiday in several countries) and the day he met his eventual wife Annette Bening. (Is a daytime quickie different than a drive-by? Is there such a thing as a “casual” groping?)

This seems a problematic method of calculation, for any number of reasons. I’m not convinced, personally, that I’ve even ever met 12,775 people, for starters. But hey, you know the saying: A day without sex is a day wasted.